TVO

Article Readability and Engagement

tvo.org has seen exponential growth within the past 4 years and even more so when COVID-19 fuelled peoples desire for thoughtful and up-to-the minute information. Even so, of the articles TVO publishes, less than 10% of articles fully engage readers who read a few articles and even less fully engage with other areas of the site.

 With the need to attract a younger more diverse audience, TVO has saught to increase the engagement of its existing users while needing to design a better experience that promotes readability, discoverability. and connectivity. 

Improvement of the structure of our articles

Since much of our engagement is reliant on SEO and Social Media engagement, making sure articles encouraged readability is important. Large, bold titles help to capture the thought of the article, while sans serif type, help make words and long paragraphs easy to read, especially on Mobile devices. 

With a stacked hero region, it also better encouraged readers to scroll down as opposed to the left, right, down reading pattern that more often than not, highlighted the esthetic weaknesses and discouraged readers from finishing an article

Highlighting the breadth of our content

In our user interviews, the lack of organization and heirarchy of content impeded with our users desire to engage with TVO articles. In fact, the presence of only “latest articles” impededed their desire to discover content because they couldn’t find the topics and sections that interested them.



Easy Wins - Revamping the Homepage Experience

In our first phase, we revamped the main homepage to serve a more balanced presence to topics and types of content TVO offers. Instead of featuring only a high volume of latest articles, we’ve paired down the amount of content featured, instead creating more visual, minimalistic layouts that highlight the quality of the content as well as our flagship programs and features we want to highlight

Future Wins - Curated Topics and Subtopics

Leaning in from the insight, from users and editors, developing the site to handle more curated topics will create more depth into the reporting TVO can do and will ensure timely topics, both short term and long term, can be highlighted and featured, creating a more personalized, nuanced and flexible current affairs experience